Gas Mixer Help?

[Daeqik]

Has anyone done any detailed experimenting with the Gas Mixer?

I'm trying to play around with different O2 H2 fuel mixes, but seem to be unable to precisely mix.

I thought "oh it must be dependent on input pressures" so I added a couple pressure regulators on the inputs, but they don't seem to be able to keep up with the mixer.

I also thought "hrmm.. input temperature sensitive?"

Anyway I now have a system where the H2 goes through some radiators, and 2 pressure regulators in parallel before hitting the mixer. The O2 goes through some radiators and 1 regulator, this seems to work, but i'm still noticing the pressure at the H2 input dropping to zero while the mixer is running.

Side note, has anyone confirmed the ideal fuel mix? I thought it was 75% H2 25% O2, but I've also heard 80%H2. I've tried both, but haven't gotten a "blue glow" from my furnace, which is what was suggested should happen during a dev stream.

-Cheers

[Fridge Lord]

What exactly is the problem, that the gas mixer stops sending gas, or the gas mix comes out as incorrect?

Gas mixers work quickly and will pump indefinitely and indiscriminately. Pressure regulators are slower, you can look up the value per tick. If you have a pressure regulator behind a gas mixer, it will bottleneck your system, and the gas mixer will only be able to work as quickly as the pressure regulator. Your bottleneck seems to be the H2 pressure regulator, as you are consuming far more H2 than you are O2 (if you are doing 75/25).

What you could do is mix the gas in some sort of intermediate holding pipe, perhaps a length or two of pipe with a gas canister storage if you wanted to go big, and then put a pressure regulator on the front to regulate how much of it goes into the furnace.

If you want to change your mix, you can send the gas out of that intermediate holding area back into a filtration system and start again, or even have a stockpile of different H2/O2 mixes if you use this canister method.

Bottom line is, the gas mixer works faster than a pressure regulator.

[Daeqik]

Yeah, mix comes out as incorrect (unless i play around with it), my pressure regulators are upstream of the mixer, the furnace isn't even connected, i'm trying to take 1 portable H2 tank and 1 portable O2 tank and mix them into a portable fuel tank.

[Fridge Lord]

So you are saying you have 2 separate input, 1 H2 and 1 O2, each having a pressure regulator on the end, and then those leads going into a gas mixer, and the gas mixer mixes in the wrong proportions?

I wonder if the gas mixer calculations get off due to some sort of rounding error at the point at which there is not a lot of gas in the inputs.

I have never had a problem when I have had adequate pressure in the input pipes. I have an H2 canister storage and an O2 canister storage, + a couple pipes each, as my gas mixer inputs. So I always have pressure in the pipes when I mix in small quantities. You can try something like that and see if it changes the behavior.

If this only happens in a system where pressure is regularly very low on the inputs due to the bottlenecking of the pressure regulators, I would wonder if there's some sort of rounding error going on. I would be interested to know if this can be reproduced.